This invention relates generally to media guidance applications, and in particular, to providing guidance for media obtained from the Internet.
The Internet is an increasingly popular resource for obtaining entertainment media and information. There are an incredible number of sources on the Internet that provide various types of media, such as downloadable television episodes and movies, or streaming television previews and movie trailers. Furthermore, nearly all of the media and related information on the Internet is available on demand. Therefore, users may be confident that media of interest is always available.
The abundance of online media and media providers, however, also creates difficulty in terms of locating media of interest. To locate particular online media content without guidance, a user may need to know a significant amount of information about the media. For example, if a user wants to find media related to a particular episode of a television show, the user may need to go directly to the media provider, which in this case is the website of the television network. Then, the user may need to know the original air date of the episode or the title of the episode in order to effectively locate media on the network website. Not only is this process inconvenient for the user, it provides no help for those who are not searching for a particular media. Thus, guidance for Internet-delivered media content is necessary to enable or aid a user to easily and effectively locate media of interest.
Some forms of guidance for media content provided on the Internet are already available. Many guidance applications for online media are limited to keyword searching and providing listings of featured media. Neither of these techniques provide effective or systematic means for narrowing down the extremely large amount of media that is available on the Internet. Thus, users of existing guidance applications are often bombarded with an overabundance of listings, many of which may be uninteresting or irrelevant. Therefore, there is a need for a guidance application that not only provides keyword searching and displays featured online media, but also provides a systematic method for narrowing down the available online media to a reasonably small set of media that interests the user.
The media listings generated by existing guidance applications are often not conducive for browsing. Video searches may yield results that are cluttered, unorganized, difficult to navigate, or unfocused. Different types of videos may be presented in similar formats, making them virtually indistinguishable. For example, professionally-generated media content may be displayed in a similar format as user-generated media content, and high-quality media content may displayed in a similar format as lower-quality media content. Therefore, users may need to spend a significant amount of time going through each media listing. Thus, there is a need for an online media guidance application that enables users to quickly browse through a set of online media listings.
Furthermore, many existing guidance applications only provide guidance for a limited set of videos on the Internet. The limited set may, therefore, not include available online media that a user is interested in. Some guidance applications are limited, because they only provide guidance for media content that they host. Other applications that obtain media from third-party sites rely on partnerships with media providers, which again results in a very limited media data set. Therefore, there is need for a guidance application that provides guidance for a comprehensive set of online media content.